Friday, December 14, 2012

Can the Internet Be Shut Down in the United States Government?

Had a discussion last night with a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, who operates, broadly speaking, in the internet sector. The talked turned to whether or not the government could shutdown the internet in the U.S. His conclusion:

There are too many geeks, who would find workarounds. The U.S. would have to "ethnically" cleanse everyone in the country with an IQ over 130, for a successful shutdown.

30 comments:

That is only true long-term. Short-term Internet shutdown is quite feasible. Unfortunately, we let our low-badwidth infrastructure which can be switched over to telephone modems and amateur packet radio to fall apart... but UUCP and Usenet software is still around. I am keeping an old dial-up modem in my lab, just in case.

All the OC-12 thru OC-768 links world-wide transit through the US at one point or another. That is why the NSA can spy on anyone anywhere by putting in a line monitor here.

So the short answer is, "YES".

The question is, "Can they maintain the outage?"

And the answer is "NO".

Severing or censoring the backbones would at least turn national and regional networks into 'internet islands' with filtered access to the rest of the internet where it existed at all.

As China's former attempt to do exactly this showed, this can only be done temporarily until people develop and use work-arounds.

It would be extremely useful, however, if the desire were simply to limit the more bandwidth-intensive applications. The work-arounds, after all, would be ad-hoc and temporary in nature. And so they would be unable to replicate the heavy-lifting capabilities of the commercial backbones the government would be servering/censoring.

Except that the majority of internet traffic relies on DNS translation to IP addresses in order to route. All you need to do is either change / corrupt the zone file for each authoritative root server, or subjugate the actual server itself. See http://root-servers.org/

The other side of the coin is to hit the routing hardware at the major US data centers (AT&T).

If the routers don't route, or the DNS names don't resolve, IP traffic doesn't go anywhere. It would be up to "the geeks" to rebuild this routing and resolving infrastructure and have all the ISPs use that clandestine system.

Long-term, can it be done? Yes, but only if there are people willing to take on a Fed Goon pointing a firearm at you telling you to quit it. I assume that wouldn't happen given the current state of affairs we have here.

There are a few issues, but the biggest one is that ICANN holds a monopoly over operation of domain name resolutions.

The reality is, anyone can be an authoritative DNS server and / or a internet traffic router. The hardware is cheap enough and small enough ( http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-products.aspx ) to look like your average AC-to-DC "wall wart." The Zone files become the gate. It has to be shared, and tended to every day.

I've frequently thought about this as an issue. The problem is the again a seen vs. unseen Austrian economic issue with the government monopoly crowding out private solutions.

We need a private, decentralized solution to this one, but currently there is no "reason" for anyone to think about it because the government owns it. To challenge the status quo you have to go up against the state to do it, and have the by in of the current providers of the system to change it. That's not going to happen at this point, as it requires a protocol change at the software / code level that would have to be universally adopted, and takes control away from the current internet service providers.

There are tons of alternate roots. Shot down the ICANNN nameservers and a slew of alternative providers will pop up, some exact copies of ICANNs. Point your network settings to the new nameserver IPs and you are good to go. No?

Cory, are you familiar with the nascent NameCoin project? It builds on Bitcoin's decentralized blockchain protocol technology to build a decentralized DNS system. While still in its infancy it does point in the right direction of decentralizing the DNS records.

Oh, and another thought. If the US government does shut down internet traffic temporarily, EVERYTHING comes to a halt, even attempts to circumvent it. Where does your e-mail go? File-sharing? Blogs and Bulletin Board systems? It all stops. Communication as we know it stops. We all go dark and it would take a significant amount of time and resources to reestablish life as we know it, let alone be able to circumvent the blockade.

I work in the IT world and I would say that the government could definitely shut down most of what we know as the internet over the short term but over the long term it would be impossible since to do so would literately shut the government and every large enterprise along with it. It would be economic suicide. I would worry more about government sanctioned spyware, viruses and covert operations to bring down certain sites it deems a threat but lacks legal authority to shut down (ie sites operating out of the US or ones like Lewrockwell.com).

Not necessarily. The routing hardware could and does filter for specific IP addresses. They could lock down the internet for their own purposes opening up those they trust and locking out those they don't. You know that the big boys would play ball. It's the little guys that will get hurt.

The real threat isn't a total government shut down of the net. The real problem is insidious government control of the internet with spying, suppression of free speech, taxes, selective control over individual access and incomprehensible regulation that makes anyone who uses the internet a potential criminal.

Not exactly. That BBS network went through the phone systems. POTS is now VOIP, and all they need to do to provision phone numbers or not provision them is to change the software. To route or not route is the question. If you're on a list, you get access, if you're not, you don't. It's that simple.

Don't get me wrong. Long term, a clandestine wireless decentralized network will prevail. Short-term it would be chaos and pandemonium. People don't realize how much our world as we know it revolves around the internet for our daily life interactions, services, and communication.

Examples of cheap solutions are here: http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-products.aspx and http://www.ubnt.com/

But once the net is blocked, how are you going to order it?

As it was said above, I think the bigger issue are the CIA's Utah data center that's basically monitoring traffic routing through the major data centers. AT&T has always been the government's lacky. It's not like they don't have the keys to the San Fran hub already.

While we're getting there, you still need to spend ~$500 on some wireless equipment and routers, and have some technical knowledge to make yourself a neighborhood hotspot. The average Joe still can't plug-n-play.

You could always shut it down and claim attack. Make false enemies such in the likeness of(or possibly even) ANONYMOUS. People overlook what the government is best at, creating distrust which could cripple.